Meet the Outdoor Boys, TikTok’s Latest Trend

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If you watch outdoor content on TikTok, you’ve probably recently come across videos with the hashtag #outdoorboys. In the past seven days alone, the tag has accompanied over 1,000 videos, which have been viewed more than 43 million times.

Videos by Outdoors

You’d probably know it if you saw it, too. Most of the videos show a skinny guy with a tightly cropped haircut and glasses demonstrating bushcraft or survival skills. Sometimes he’s carving shelter out of a snowbank, catching a monster fish, or having a Nerf battle with his kids.

Given the recent spike of the TikTok tag, it raises the obvious question: who or what are the #outdoorboys? If you guessed that it’s also a channel, you guessed correctly.

The Outdoor Boys started as a YouTube channel documenting the adventures of host Luke Nichols—the aforementioned skinny guy with glasses—and his three young boys. Since launching in 2015, the channel has grown to 6.29 million subscribers, and it’s even expanded to multiple social channels, including a Reddit page.

During the nine years of making content, Nichols has published more than 400 videos of varying lengths, highlighting aspects of his life and the lives of his sons, who are all under the age of 10. In the last few years, though, he’s been cranking out documentary-style videos, showing how he or he and his family travel, learn new outdoor skills or survive in the wilderness. Today, fans say they like the simple and wholesome nature of the show.

Because our attempts to contact Nichols were unsuccessful, we tried to answer as many questions as we could with some old-fashioned internet sleuthing. Looking at his professional pages and an interview with Alaska’s Come Unto Christ church, Nichols shared the story of how he turned his love of the outdoors into his profession.

Nichols said that he started working on the Outdoor Boys project and his fishing channel Catfish and Carp full time in 2020, but he developed his passion for the outdoors as a child growing up in Alaska.

He explained that he left Alaska when he was 19 to go on a mission trip to Japan for the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He called it “the most amazing experience of my life.” Then, he returned to the States, where he attended college at Brigham Young University.

While living in Salt Lake City, he met his wife, Rebecca. After college, he started a political consulting firm where he ran some 20 campaigns over a three-year period. “But the hours and the environment were so bad for family life,” he said. “I just decided I had to do something else.”

So they moved to Virginia, where Nichols attended law school at George Mason University. Later, he started his own practice doing criminal defense work, specifically focusing on traffic law. A few years later, he and Rebecca bought a house out in the Virginia countryside and started having kids.

About the time his first son was born, Nichols started posting fishing videos. “It just kind of got bigger and bigger and bigger until pretty much it was bigger than running my law practice,” he said.

With such a big spike in viewership, he decided to make his hobby his full-time job. Although he said it’s “really nice” to fish and camp with his family and that he enjoys it, he said his faith and his family are what bring him happiness.